ABSTRACT
Automation has to be seen as an especially significant part of the overall process of mechanisation. Automation is thus a vital and analytically distinguishable stage on the way to realising what Bright calls ‘a conscious effort to synthesize a total mechanised production system’. The control devices associated with automation serve to direct and integrate a production system more fully and more perfectly. There are the primary information industries, producing information machines and marketing information services; examples are the telephone and computer industries and the banking industry. Jonathan Gershuny’s insight is to distinguish, within tertiary industry, goods-related from service-related employment and to observe that the firm trend in the UK is for consumers to substitute goods for services. The general tendency for an overall increase in service employment to be generated as consumers’ needs become more differentiated and personalised, would appear to be coming to an end in the most advanced industrial economies.
